2002

Hello everyone.

As of 21 April it has now been one year since
Dr John Whitman Ray passed
away while visiting New Zealand. It therefore strikes me as an opportune
time to reflect on a few aspects of this man's incredible contribution
to our lives, a contribution that few of us will ever fully appreciate.

As I look back I recall observing many times when it was difficult to
separate the man from his teachings. We know there are higher laws
(principles) and lower laws and that following a higher law necessitates
breaking a lower law that is encompassed by the higher law. I have seen
how we have all at times made the mistake of assuming that because we
understand some principles, we therefore understand all principles.
Therefore we see things without truly understanding them and draw
conclusions based on incomplete knowledge, while at the same time
believing we could not be wrong in our estimation.

We see others through the filter of our own crystals, and thus even if
they have changed but we have not, we see them the same still.

If we consider this carefully, we will observe that our estimation is
exactly that, our estimation. When two people observe each other, they
frequently cannot observe objectively because of the presence of
reactive patterns, most of which I have come to find in my own
experience are well hidden. Therefore we should remember that no matter
how much truth we have today, while we continue to have any reactivity,
there is more truth to be uncovered and we are not yet capable of
objective observation. The presence of crystallised patterns of
emotional reactivity has made us highly subjective observers.

This considered, it would be folly to assume that we are in a position
to make a valid judgement about another human (or situation for that
matter), be it a judgement for good, for bad, or anything in between or
outside of this. Our responsibility always lies at our own feet. What
are WE doing, what are WE saying, what are WE thinking, what are WE
feeling?

I have brought this to your attention as a preface to what follows
because I do not wish to enshrine John the man, nor do I wish to
belittle him. My object is to remind us all that it is the principles
that count, not the personalities (nor the perceived personalities).

If we consider the concept of Inertia as it applies to the human mind,
we all have choices at this point in time to continue in our course of
action, change it, instigate a new course, or stop an existing course.
Because things have always been a done a certain way is not sufficient
reason to continue doing them the same way. So let us not make the
mistake of forgoing our personal responsibility to make choices because
we wish to honour someone else's choice.

Mistake me not, neither is the absence of John a sufficient reason to
change. There is only one valid reason for making a choice to change or
persist, and that is because we in our own conscience believe it is the
right thing to do, as measured by our own yardstick of individual
responsibility and knowledge.

It seems there is often talk of inclusion and exclusion, unity and
separation. Often in our avid desire to
pursue a correct principle we resist the false principle and thus
undermine our own ability to apply the correct principle. This is a
learning curve for all of us, no matter how much knowledge and
experience any of us may have. John called it "the razor's edge".

This all said, I wrote the following article shortly after John's death
last year as an address to the AGM of the
Body Electronics Institute of
New Zealand. I believe there is a message in here for all of us. If I
have not been clear in my explanation, or if you wish to clarify
something, please contact me personally so that we may have no
misunderstandings.

President’s Address to the 2001 BEINZ AGM

In the wake of John’s passing, may what we perhaps consider as our
darkest hour be recognised as our lightest hour, as we become aware of
sharing a common goal, the preservation of
Body Electronics
and the
continuation of John’s work. I ask you to consider what I’m about to say
with an open mind and an open heart, as I outline the next steps in the
future that I see for Body Electronics in NZ and the world.

I have already stated that in our awareness of our common goal, there is
great light, and so there is. Each is free to decide what their
individual view of this common goal is and I am not asking you to
subscribe to my view, just to consider it and then choose for yourself.
Simply because I am the President of BEINZ, or because I have been given
certain training or done certain work does not make my views inherently
any more important or valid than any other person’s. Perhaps I see
things a different way from you.

I am an individual with free will, just like you. Just like you, I have
my own crystals to deal with. Just like you, I am human and don’t always
do as good a job of adhering to the principles as I might like. Yet in
spite of this, it’s necessary for me to realise that all is Perfect
Divine Order here and to recognise that we each are doing the best that
we can right now and to be patient as I and others come to grips with
our own unique lessons.

Nevertheless, I am the President, I have received a substantial amount
of training from John and I have made great application of the
principles and received great blessings from that application. I
therefore have a viewpoint that I would like to share with you, on the
understanding that each is free to accept or reject my view and that
each is free to express their own view. My ideas are offered here for
discussion and not set in concrete, yet in my position as a
knowledge-holder, I bear a certain responsibility to help this group
come to the best level of understanding and agreement possible. I trust
that each of us will assume responsibility for sharing our own view and
helping come to that position of agreement. I therefore invite you into
this circle to participate in the future of Body Electronics.

There seem to be two common keynotes in my discussions with various
people in the recent weeks since John’s passing: the question of how we
preserve the true teachings of Body Electronics, and the question of how
we continue John’s work. I will attend to the second question first by
asking a question that I hope does not shock you too much. Do we need to
continue John’s work?

I believe that John had a specifically appointed task to complete on
this planet, a task which was his alone to perform and in the manner in
which he saw fit. Many have been shocked by that manner; many have been
saved by it and now feel they owe something in return for that service
to help preserve Body Electronics. Those of us who assisted John on
different levels necessarily contributed to the task in a specific way
as we sought to follow and support John’s teachings.

I believe that John completed the necessary part of his task insofar as
that those who are now free do not squander their freedom. Our
responsibility to John is overshadowed by our responsibility to
ourselves in this sense. We need to apply the principles to ourselves.
We do not need to consider how to continue John’s work; John’s work is
done. We need to apply ourselves to our work, that our work be complete
by the time we need to move on. John never wanted us to follow him.
Those who believe otherwise have missed a key point of following
principles rather than personalities.

John’s work is done. I see the evidence of it in the people I see around
me and I see it in myself. The real question that we must all thoroughly
engage ourselves in answering is, “What is my work?”

John’s work is not our work. Therefore let us be quite certain that we
are not avoiding our own responsibilities under the illusion that we
should be attending to someone else’s.

John would remind you to work on your own List, your own items of karmic
incompletion, and I will do this also. We don’t have to be like John, we
don’t have to try and do what he did, we don’t have to do things the way
John did them. We do have to be true to our own hearts, we do have to
look at the principles John taught us and search our hearts to see
whether we consider them to be true principles. If we perceive them as
true, then we must have faith in them, apply them and learn from them in
our own experience.

We may not do the same things John did… or we may. However, at all
times, let us choose according to the dictates of our heart as we see it
today, rather than out of loyalty to a memory or a possibly misplaced
ideal. Let us at all times do things the way we would do them,
regardless of how John would’ve done them, not to be different from John
or to be the same as John, but to be ourselves.

It was not the man who was important in the teachings, but the teachings
themselves. You may think me harsh; so be it. There is a subtle yet
critical difference between following someone’s example because we think
we should, and following that example because of the self-evident truth
and value of the principles involved, coming from a position of faith.
Both ideas seem to be associated with faith, but the first is blind
faith that comes from reactivity and the second is a knowing faith bred
of inner certainty and directed by the Spirit of God.

Let me repeat the distinction we need to come to. It is one thing to
follow someone’s example because we feel some compulsion to or because
we trust that person’s judgement or because they are a great person, but
wholly another thing to follow that example because we see the truth of
the principles involved. As an example of this second kind of faith,
Jesus instructed his disciples to do as he did and speak as he spoke,
not because he saw himself as a saint but because he could see the truth
of the principles he was demonstrating. Even so, the instruction was to
trust not in the arm of flesh but in the arm of God.

In the first case we are placing responsibility outside of ourselves and
seeing things in terms of success or failure. In the second case we
place responsibility squarely upon our own shoulders and do not
recognise success or failure, since all is recognised as Perfect, and no
judgements or expectations are attached to particular outcomes,
desirable or otherwise.

This means that even though the outer actions may be identical, one
motivation for those actions will make the actions self-destructive and
the other will make them illuminating and freeing. I implore you that in
all dealings with the principles of Body Electronics you endeavour to
apply them because you perceive their truth and are willing to accept
full responsibility for your actions, rather than because of the
misplaced belief that “John would’ve wanted me to” or because “it’s the
right thing to do”. If we try to apply these principles from the
perspective of such resistances, we’ll tie ourselves up in knots.

Let us focus on what is appropriate to do in light of what we know now,
so that we can be observant in this moment and see what needs to be
done, rather than getting hung up on any absolute ideals of “rightness”
and “wrongness”. Please hear me right on this, I’m not talking about
throwing the rules out, quite the opposite, but I am talking about
coming to an understanding of our motivations and accepting individual
responsibility in all that we do concerning ourselves and Body
Electronics. I repeat, we do not need to do John’s work, we need to do
our own work.

John frequently reminded us that, “Neglected opportunities never come
again.” Each opportunity exists only for a moment of time. If we are
present in that moment we can seize the opportunity; if we are stuck in
the past or concerned about the future, we cannot be present to this
moment and cannot seize the opportunity we do have. Frequently we do not
even realise that there is an opportunity.

Some of us may feel we have missed certain opportunities and perhaps we
have, but every moment presents a new opportunity. Let us focus on this
moment and take full advantage of the abundance of opportunities before
us.

As for the question of “how do we preserve the true teachings of Body
Electronics?”, this is a question that is too big for us to decide here.
Individually we can certainly contribute to the preservation of these
teachings simply by doing as I’ve already stated, acting upon our
individual responsibility to “test all things and hold fast that which
is true”. Ultimately, the true teachings are preserved in the hearts of
every individual who chooses to dedicate themselves to coming to an
experiential understanding of those teachings. That is the simplicity of
it, because ultimately all knowledge comes from God, not man.

The complexity of it involves many people from different parts of the
world coming together and being patient with each other as we come to a
point of common understanding and agreement about what the next
practical steps are. For each of you, I say not to worry about how long
such processes may take and not to have fear that things may not turn
out the way you hope. For my part, I recommend that expediency take a
back seat to unity.

What are the “true” teachings that we wish to preserve? I know no-one
who has a complete understanding of Body Electronics and there were by
John’s own admission many things he did not understand about it himself.
The true teachings are whatever they are. What was seen as truth
yesterday is frequently seen to be false tomorrow. This does not mean
the truth itself is changing, far from it. John’s spiritual teacher
often stated that the ordinances of God never change, just man’s
interpretation of them. It is perhaps John’s perspective we wish to
preserve, but do not forget that all knowledge comes from God. We have
the challenge of taking responsibility for our own actions coming from
our own perspective and no-one else’s.

So our perception of the true teachings of Body Electronics is
constantly evolving as we apply ourselves to the task of freeing our own
minds and as we become ever more capable of grasping greater and more
subtle truths. Let us not enshrine our current state of knowledge in our
haste to preserve it and become thus bound in ignorance.

Things will change in our perception; they always have and they will
continue to do so. We now share the responsibility, individually and
collectively for that change. We are now the custodians of a sacred
technique for freeing minds from age-old programming. This is not just
another healing modality.

The point we need to come to in the preservation of Body Electronics is
a painful one as we recognise that our differences need to be respected
as evidence of our diversity and individuality, but at the same time
recognising the need for unity of purpose and action to arise from
amongst that diversity. We understand this intellectually. Achieving
this unity requires the individual sacrifice of enduring our own pain
lovingly and willingly as we submit ourselves to the consideration of
the agenda and motives of others as if they were our own agendas and
motives. Not until we can understand each other, can we truly find
unity.

Nonetheless, let us start where we can and at least find some things we
hold as common viewpoints. We all want Body Electronics to survive, do
we not? Therefore let us not be overly ambitious or eager and try to run
by ourselves before we have mastered walking together. This is the
concept of unity at the lowest or most simple level of commonality that
is built into The List and group activity. It is not the apparently
“important” items on our List that need to be attended to first, but
rather the “simple” items, those where we can collectively see the end
from the beginning.

What I am asking each of us to consider today is the need to confront
our own resistance towards someone else’s viewpoint and enter into
patient dialogue so that we can move unerringly towards unity, rather
than rushing to complete some task we intellectually believe John wanted
done, or some task we believe should be done, in isolation of those
others who we have agreed to work with within our sphere of activity.
Unity needs to be our base, our foundation. Without that, any short term
gains of instant isolated action, no matter how expedient, will
eventually create division. This is the way it is. If you are not
actively creating unity, you are creating division and separation.

Unity is a two-way street. Yet as far as individual responsibility is
concerned, we must each root out our own desires for separation and
division and not look to what division we perceive those around us to be
creating. This is our challenge if we want to contribute to the
preservation of Body Electronics. Let each of us attend to our own
business first and foremost, and let that business foster unity by
learning to confront our own resistances. And finally, let us support
each other as we recognise that we’re all in the same boat of working
towards perfection.

I guess that everyone wants to know what’s next. We have a lot of
careful and prayerful thinking to do regarding that. Yet, rest assured
that there are no insurmountable obstacles. BEINZ has a stable
foundation, unlike any other Body Electronics organisation in the world.
We have the agreement of Doug Morrison to aid us in completing the
supervision of those wishing to become Practitioners and eventually
Instructors.

We have each been given a piece of the puzzle by John; it is now up to
us to put that puzzle together and reveal the whole which has always
been there. We have the principles, we have God. We just need to apply
the principles and ask God for illumination and assistance.

If there is any fear here, realise that it is simply the fear that
naturally arises as we begin to take responsibility for our future.
There are no demons other than the ones we give recognition and power
to. The trick for each of us is to recognise that this too is Perfect
Divine Order. Thank you John.

I invite anyone who has ideas to contribute to the furtherance of Body
Electronics to come forward and join the circle of those who wish to
understand each other. I trust you will find me receptive to your ideas.

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